October
27,
2003
Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment
is following two of the best books he’s written, so I suppose he’s earned the right to phone this one in.
And he did. This is Discworld thematic puree — take a good dose of the gender role stuff from Sourcery, mix it up with the international-relations stuff of Jingo, take a bit of the ethnic-mixing stuff from Feet of Clay, touch on the power of the press from The Truth, and throw in a bit of Vimes-in-Eastern-Europe from Carpe Jugulum (or was that The Fifth Elephant? Both?), and voila. You’ve got yourself a heaping helping of Monstrous Regiment.
That doesn’t mean it’s a bad book; I’m not even sure if Pratchett
could write a bad book, any more. Monstrous Regiment moves
along quite nicely, is skillfully written, and has interesting (if
familiar) characters. Judged against other humorous fantasy, it’s a
work of pure, iridescent brilliance; but judged against other
Discworld books, it’s nothing special. It seems destined to be one of
those middle-of-the-pack ones that you can never remember (Quick!
What’s Men at Arms about?).
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October
23,
2003
Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver
is, as you might guess
from the long interval between entries here, a very long book. This
isn’t a bad thing; back when I was reading that Elizabeth Moon
series, I promised to explain why vast length can be a virtue for
a particular kind of book, but got side-tracked when those books took
a left turn into D&D-land. But with Quicksilver, I’ve got
a book that perfectly demonstrates the benefits of length.
Fundamentally, Quicksilver is about change — change in the
characters, change in technology, and change in the world. It spans a
historical period from the Restoration to the Glorious Revolution
(which, sure, is only about 25 years, but it’s a very busy 25
years), and follows characters from early youth to late middle age.
By the end of the book, the world and characters are vastly different
than they were at the beginning.
In a short book, that could be jarring. Either you’d have to just
skip over a huge block of time, or you’d have to do some kind of
musical montage showing all the changes that were occurring. In
either case, though, you couldn’t get the same effect that
Quicksilver provides — that of change so gradual, that you
don’t even notice it until you think back to what things used to be
like back at the beginning. To get that subtle and powerful effect,
you need length.
You also need a period where lots of things change, and
Quicksilver certainly has that, as it’s set in the late-middle
of England’s most turbulent period of history. It was initially
surprising that a “sequel” to Cryptonomicon, which is set in
the day after next Tuesday, would take place in the early-modern past;
but after reading the book, it makes perfect sense. There are greater
parallels than you’d expect between Quicksilver and
Cryptonomicon, and the existence and connection of the former
book adds a certain perspective to the latter.
Consider the Waterhouse plots. In Cryptonomicon, we see
Randy Waterhouse taking place in the center-periphery of the Internet
revolution; in Quicksilver, we see Daniel Waterhouse in the
center-periphery of the scientific revolution. In both cases, the
world is changing, drastically and permanently, and nobody quite
understands how it’s changing, or what things will look like
when it’s done. The mad chaos and wild experimentation of the early
Royal Society as it creates the gold of Natural Philosophy from the
lead of Alchemy retrospectively plays up the chaotic uncertainty that
accompanied the Internet revolution, and shows it to be the normal way
of things in times of frantic discovery and change. (Similarly, the
Shaftoe plots are both picaresque wanderings over war-torn
Europe.)
So while Cryptonomicon and Quicksilver are quite
different (which, based on some of the inexplicably-negative reviews
I’ve seen, seems to have scared off some significant fraction of the
Slashdot-geek crowd; if it doesn’t have computers in it, they’re just
not interested, apparently), they’re more alike than you might think,
too — particularly stylistically.
Even though he’s dealing with a different time period, Stephenson
is still post-modernishly cheeky. In Quicksilver, he plays
around with form — part of the story is told in diary form, part of it
is epistolary, there’s a play or two, and there’s even a stunning and
surreal song-and-dance musical number. Also, there are his odd
deliberate word choices, like “phant’sy” instead of “fancy”, and
“rooves” as a plural of roof.
Also present are the occasional entertaining infodumps of
Cryptonomicon; Stephenson’s exposition is classically
science-fictional: Unlike writers of straight historicals, Stephenson
treats past societies as alien and foreign, and inclues the reader
exactly as if they were reading about politics on Rigel IV and the
development of the hyper-warp engine, instead of politics in London
and the development of the calculus.
If it isn’t clear already, I think Quicksilver is brilliant,
and that you should go out and read it immediately if it sounds at all
appealing. The best compliment I can give it is to say that it took
me most of a month to read it, but when I’d finally finished it, I
wished there were more. (Which there will be — two more
presumptively-brick-like books will complete The Baroque Cycle.)
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